Short Message Service (SMS) is a popular wireless telephone feature with which a subscriber enters a short text message with their cell phone keypad and sends the message to a recipient after entering the telephone number of the recipient. The recipient is alerted to the incoming message and the text message is displayed on the display screen of the recipient's phone.
In certain circumstances, however, such as while driving, keying a text message into the phone is difficult or outright dangerous. Additionally, visually impaired persons may find it difficult to visually confirm that they entered a message in correctly. It would be useful, therefore, to have a text messenger solution that allowed a user to create and send a text message by speaking into the phone. The present invention provides such a solution.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,950,123 issued Sep. 7, 1999 to Schwelb et al., and entitled CELLULAR TELEPHONE NETWORK SUPPORT OF AUDIBLE INFORMATION DELIVERY TO VISUALLY IMPAIRED SUBSCRIBERS, describes a text-to-speech delivery system for text messages to a visually impaired recipient, but does not describe an IVR-based and speech-to-text message creation solution of the present invention.
Published European patent application no. 1185068 A2, published Mar. 6, 2002, by Uri Lewin, et al., and entitled METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR VOICE MESSAGING ORIGINATED BY MOBILE TERMINALS, discloses methods and systems for voice mail messages and transferring voice messages among wireless subscribers of different networks, a process the disclosure refers to Voice SMS, but does not provide a text message solution of the present invention.